


Hyphae Fragments; or Daydreams of Near Misses

by shopfront



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Captain Killy Lives, Gen, Mirror Universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-23
Updated: 2018-03-23
Packaged: 2019-04-01 02:42:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13988781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shopfront/pseuds/shopfront
Summary: Where Killy’s been, and where Sylvia is going as she escapes the fallout of the Discovery meddling in her life.





	Hyphae Fragments; or Daydreams of Near Misses

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Northland](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Northland/gifts).



> Violence/violent thoughts and some minor canonic character death appropriate to a Mirrorverse character centric story, but no deaths are depicted in graphic detail. No other warnings apply.

For a moment Sylvia thought she’d simply tripped while exiting the turbolift. Not the most unforgivable of mistakes by any means. But certainly not a smart error when alone with an ambitious lieutenant, nor one that she was in the habit of making.  

She had just caught herself with a hand outstretched against the nearest wall for balance when she noticed everything had gone eerily still. Wary, she surveyed the hallway as it stretched out before them. And stretch it certainly did. Slowly and silently distorting for long seconds that felt like hours, until suddenly everything snapped back together with a rush.

This time Sylvia really did stumble. After she’d caught her balance again, she brushed a wall of blonde hair out of her eyes and looked up. The first thing she saw was the narrowed eyes of her lieutenant shifting away from her. Green eyes, that had been fixed on the sidearm holstered in his Captain’s belt. In her belt. 

Sylvia clenched her jaw and straightened slowly. A security officer disinclined to see to her security was a lieutenant that she had no use for. 

By the time the ISS Discovery was rocked by the first volley of missiles, Captain Sylvia Tilly was wiping blood off her hands as she stepped back into the turbolift. Alone. The lift immediately hummed around her as it began to move, and then shuddered to a dark, silent stop almost as quickly. Seconds later, the ship rocked again. 

“What the hell are you idiots doing up there?” Sylvia snarled into her communicator. When the status report crackled back in disjointed yells and static, she blinked in surprise. “Klingons?” she repeated disbelievingly. Then she cursed and kicked the lift door once. Hard.

With a grimace, she quickly switched her foot for a fist and continued to bang even as she reached for her comm again with her other hand. The ship rocked violently with each thump, almost in concert with her anger. “This is your Captain speaking,” she began sweetly into an open comm link. “If the turbolifts aren’t fully functional in the next thirty seconds the entire engineering staff along with the first person I see outside of this lift will spend the next month in an agoniser!” she continued, her voice rising to a yell by the end.

It only took twenty eight seconds for the lights to come back on again. Sylvia huffed with amusement as the lift began moving. “That’s better.” But she didn’t repeat the command for transport to the bridge. 

There was too much cross chatter to be certain about what was happening, but a fire was settling low in her gut as each rock of the ship grew wilder and more violent. Nobody earned a nickname like Killy without good instincts for when other people’s lives should be a secondary concern. So when Sylvia gave her command, she directed the lift to the shuttle bay instead.

It wasn’t long before she was seeing the Bird-of-Prey through a shuttle viewscreen. Despite the report she’d been given, the sight of it was still a shock. It had been years since she’d seen a ship like that in battle.

But there was no time to properly consider the spectre of the Klingons resurrected to once again attack the Empire, and Sylvia turned quickly back to the shuttle controls. The ISS Discovery was buckling violently above her under the Klingon’s onslaught, and Sylvia’s piloting skills were rusty enough to demand all of her attention. Even without a firefight happening around her. As she abandoned her own ship behind her, Sylvia contemplated regret over not allowing one of the pilots to join her. 

They had certainly seemed frantic enough to be perfectly biddable. But her memory of the lieutenant’s eyes quickly wiped the thought away again, even as she barely made it clear of the path of a nacelle as it was shot clean off the Discovery’s hull. 

Grimly, she plotted a course that hopefully wouldn’t leave the shuttle cleaved similarly in two. The nacelle wasn’t the only thing coming apart at the seams around her. Shattered pieces of hull and other debris were flying in all directions. The jumble of parts and smouldering metal was being broken up further here and there by Klingon fire gone wide from, or sometimes even clear through, their targets. Each shot turned the debris field into a dazzling array of sparks and smaller explosions. 

Sylvia quickly dodged another larger piece of hull, a handful of missiles, and then something that was spinning past her into empty space too fast for her to identify. With each near miss her attention narrowed, as one almost-crisis rapidly appeared on the heels of another.

By the time Discovery’s shields finally failed and turned the ship into a spectacular fireball, it was no longer in her line of sight. Her ship - the same one which she had fought so hard to win and to hold - was gone in an instant, and Sylvia had missed that moment. But she couldn’t miss the resulting shockwave. It caught up the shuttle and everything else nearby and flung it all further out into the dark, shorting out the control panel and sending her flying. 

“Goddammit,” she cried as she struggled to remain in her seat, but it was futile. Something hard rose up to meet the side of her head, and Sylvia barely had time to register a dull throb to mirror the one in her foot before everything went black.

*

“Kelpien,” Sylvia muttered as she stirred and gingerly felt at the area around her head with her eyes still shut. Somebody was going to pay. Her bedding was as hard as rock, and she seemed to have lost every single one of her pillows in the night. “Kelpien!” Sylvia turned over with an angry mutter, rousing enough to yell for her body slave once more and- 

Oh.

The small confines of a shuttle greeted her. Sylvia groaned deeply as the events of the previous day - night? She couldn’t see a chronometer from the floor - came flooding back. She wasn’t hungover in a poorly made bed with an absent slave like she’d assumed. Instead she was lying injured on the metal floor of a ship.

Sharply, she pushed herself to her feet. Then, almost as quickly, she collapsed back to her knees with her hand held to her head. Her fingers came away sticky. Gritting her teeth, Sylvia forced herself up once more and staggered back to the controls. Lights were blinking haphazardly across it, but after a cautious few minutes of surveying them and altering the controls she was at least sure that all the necessary functions for life support had remained intact.

But there was no working propulsion system, she realised with a sinking feeling. Looking up, she watched unfamiliar stars rotate slowly past on the viewscreen. A few pieces of debris dotted the empty space around her, but for the most part all she could see was inky blackness. A vast nothing that she seemed to be slowly spinning through with no working controls. Or communications, she realised with an even deeper sense of foreboding.

Not that calling for rescue would likely land her anywhere other than dead at the hands of either rebels or a rival Captain. But still, she would have at least preferred to have that option over being stuck adrift in a broken shuttle. She sat back with a sigh and considered her options.

Or her lack of options.

The first twenty four hours crawled by in a haze that was part boredom and part concussion. Once she’d suffered through the first dozen or more achingly slow rotations as she tried and failed to find a recognisable pattern among the stars, Sylvia had turned her back on the viewscreen in disgust. After removing her armour and tying back her hair, she’d crawled under the console and begun fiddling with the wiring. She wasn’t a pilot, and she definitely wasn’t an engineer. But after the third and seventh attempts on her life she’d made a point of learning enough of both to get by on her own when she needed to.

Or at least enough to make sure she didn’t fry the remaining life support while trying to fix navigation.

Two days later she had slept, eaten, bandaged and re-bandaged her head, bemoaned the lack of proper bathing facilities colourfully and at length to the silent shuttle walls, and re-established one way communications. Unfortunately, the direction of communication was incoming and not outgoing. But at least she wasn’t going to go mad listening to just her own voice.

Instead, she was going mad listening to the imbeciles and soft-hearted wretches that bore no resemblance to the Empire she knew.

The comm crackled again as she poked half-heartedly through the food stores in search of breakfast. Sylvia cocked her head and listened to the exchange for a moment, before she shook it in disgust. “Tellarite and Vulcan Captains,” she said with a curl of her lip, as she picked up a packet at random and ripped it open a little too viciously. A shower of crumbs rained down on her lap, which she brushed off with rough jerks of her hand. “Absurd.”

But she continued listening as she bit into the broken remains of her breakfast. Nothing she had heard was familiar. At first she’d thought that she was just hallucinating from her head injury. Or that she’d died and gone to some hellishly confusing afterlife. But the longer she’d listened, the more a distant memory had surfaced. A memory of receiving the favour of her Emperor after a successful conquest. Of hearing the whispers and rumours that often swirled quickly through the palace - and were just as swiftly brought to an abrupt end - and not understanding any of them.

Strange words and phrases. Federation. Starfleet, but not the Imperial Fleet. Peace.

Absurdities. Memories that now made her miss the comfort and familiarity of the cruelties of home. Once she was finished with her breakfast, Sylvia crawled back under the console. Only the sound of the communicator and her own periodic snorts of disbelief kept her company as she worked.

*

Her earliest dreams had always been awash in green tones and full of impossible to remember obstacles. Waking up in an Empire training dorm with tears on her face had quickly proved unwise; being distracted by recollections of struggling to attain unfamiliar things only to be knocked back down again and again a risky way to start her day. Being laughed at had only painted a target on her back in a world full of people looking for target practice. 

Weakness was something to be despised and eradicated, and Sylvia quickly discovered that she had a talent for eradication. For conquering. 

Soon it mattered little whether it was herself or others that she needed to conquer, as long as people saw her do it. There was no need for dreams when everybody fell in line from fear. But if Sylvia wanted to climb the ranks and grind her enemies beneath her heel, then she couldn’t be just another airhead sadist with a knife fetish. No. She needed to be as light and smart and silent as her blade, and twice as deadly.

By the time she completed her training and was allowed to join the Imperial Fleet, Sylvia wasn't sure if she still dreamt in green. Instead, she had trained herself to wake in stages. Stretching out all of her senses to orient herself before she opened her eyes, from the feel of her bed to the smell of the room and the sound of any whispers and creeping feet. 

Any traces that lingered from her sleeping mind were quickly wiped away in the process, and it became a rare moment when something truly surprised her upon waking anymore. Whenever a person died in Captain Killy’s bed, nobody was surprised to learn that it wasn’t Sylvia Tilly.

The first time she bowed before her Emperor, she thrilled with the knowledge that those cold, dark eyes were the ones she would be working to please. That the sharp smile she saw struck her as belonging to someone who would appreciate her strength. Her finely honed lack of weakness. When her Emperor asked her, for the first time but not the last, “and why do you want to be a Captain in _my_ Imperial Fleet? I would have thought you were too intelligent to spend your days with a knife held to your back for the sake of ambition,” Sylvia had smiled

“Because I’ll be the best Captain under your command,” she had replied in a loud, clear voice. She hadn’t let her eyes be drawn to the thunderous expression on the face of the Emperor’s daughter, even as her Emperor laughed.

Her dreams washed green once more that night, but all she remembered was the sensation of her footsteps being guided along a path she couldn’t see by a force she didn’t understand. When she awoke, now the Captain newly appointed as the Emperor’s right hand of vengeance against the enemies of the Empire, she let the dream fade like all the others.

*

The unrelenting darkness was finally broken by beams of light through her viewscreen. It blinded her, and also bathed her in something other than the emptiness of space for the first time in days. 

For a moment she mistook the light for more green, as tendrils of memory held fast to her like they hadn’t in a long time.

But this light moved as she stirred, drawing up in front of and then moving in sync with the rotations of her shuttle. There was a repetitive noise coming through on the communicator. A voice that sounded like they had been repeating themselves with increasing urgency for some time now, but the words were fuzzy. Like her dreams. They all slipped away from her before she could understand them.

Sylvia raised a hand to shield her eyes. Tried to see her oncoming attackers even as she tried, and failed, to get to her feet. The movement made her gasp for breath and flail at her chest.

The air was too thin. Apparently she’d nicked a life support wire, after all.

The tone of the voice over the communicator changed, and then went silent. ‘Conferring with a ship,’ she thought to herself, struggling to piece the idea together. Maybe they were planning to shoot her, or take her prisoner. An icy rush of fear and adrenaline flooded her veins, even as she began to de-materialise-

She could have done it, she insisted to herself later. Hurt them, driven a knife into a few important backs while they were distracted. The same knife she now kept in her Starfleet-issue boots, the ones that marked her as a civilian refugee to go with her Starfleet-issue refugee clothes. She could have had the ship in the palm of her hand in an instant. 

They didn’t know her face. They weren’t ready for what she could do, and their uniforms are all so drab and boring like their boring little lives so if she pulled a weapon on them… but still she doesn’t.

Instead, they continued to come up to her with their smiles and their kind hands. To offer her things to wear and use and eat. They helped her to her feet whenever the last fading vestiges of her head injury make her dizzy. They even reassured her, "it’s nothing major, please don’t worry. Some of our medical equipment was damaged during the war and we haven’t had much chance to re-supply. Please come back if you have any problems or it gets worse, but it should resolve on its own with time." 

It all made her want to rip and rend and scream, and knock their smug little diagnostic tools out of their smug little hands. Sylvia felt weak from the need to rely on blind fools. But she had much to learn. She could bide her time. Sylvia had always been good at that.

The days turned into weeks and passed her by, teaching her new things about her new world as they went. There were fire fights and boarding parties, and above it all stood Sylvia Tilly of the Terran Empire. Surviving. Nobody succeeded against her in a fight, even when the others coddled her and her injury and tried to keep her hidden from any conflict with the other refugees. Until it finally happened. 

Somebody identified her by name, called after her in a corridor. _Ensign_ Sylvia Tilly of the _USS_ Discovery. Her mind went blank. 

Later, she wondered why it hadn’t occurred to her before now. Despite the fighting, much of her time amongst them had been spent watching and listening. Plenty of time to practice how to curb her tongue over their idiocy while she waited, and to think. To dream. To have considered the possibility-

Something tugged deep in her belly as her name - but not her name, that could never be her name - was repeated with concern. But she was not Starfleet. Sylvia Tilly was a Captain of the Imperial Fleet. She couldn’t ever be a part of this Starfleet, because she refused to be that weak.

They informed her that the ship would finally dock for medical supplies in the morning even as they cast concerned eyes over her head scans once again. But she said nothing in reply. Sylvia could slip through their fingers like water if she wanted to, even with her head still throbbing the occasional warning. It was nothing she couldn’t handle once the knife from her boot was placed back in her belt.

There was a war going on that Sylvia could disappear into. So she did.

*

If her Emperor could only see her now, Sylvia sometimes thought to herself. Captain Killy was no more, replaced by a woman who traded in scraps and violent favours. Who listened once more to her dreams, and followed her gut out of a lack of anything better to do.

Dodging Starfleet and the dreaded title of Ensign (always spoken in surprise, always followed by that hateful concern) had led her to kneel at the feet of her enemy. To Qo’noS. The one place where the allies of her inferior copy could not find her as she sheltered among the anonymous green crowds of the Orions.

The many shades of her new neighbours matched her dreams, which came more and more frequently the longer she remained among them. A splash of colour now also in her waking life. Perhaps it uncomfortably mirrored the landscape of her subconscious, but the Orions also respected strength and Sylvia had that in spades. She bent arms and broke them when she had to. Bit by bit she carved herself out a new life. Even became fond of it, in her own way. Weakness was still something to spit on, but here the targets people tried to paint on her back washed away with the next thunderstorm and the people might sometimes be drab but they were certainly never boring.

She took up a formal residence in the centre of the outpost. A gaudy place full of sharp objects that she could twirl around her fingers while she entertained visitors who wished to hire her to do their dirty work. Sylvia also made herself a secret bolthole on the outskirts of the settlement, amongst the rocks and sludge of the Klingon homeworld. The mud of the Empire's enemies. She uncovered a tiny runt of a Targ in the dirt as she dug out the foundation of her second new home. A soft, squirming beast that licked her face and made her smile.

It was weak for a Targ, but something stayed her hand. Instead, she removed the creature from her building area and continued to work. But when she returned the next night, she found it curled up under the tarp that covered her construction materials.

Sylvia scratched it under the chin and called it Empire. When it followed her home at her heels in the early hours of the next dawn, she didn’t try to stop it.

Chasing Empire was what lead her into a drug den. It was a place that she wouldn’t normally deign to grace with her presence unless she was being paid. But it was the now familiar tug in her belly that drew her eyes up from her misbehaving pet to rest upon an even more familiar face.

Sylvia quickly stepped out of the doorway, and tugged Empire after her into a curtained nook. Something in her desperately wanted to fall in lockstep with the sleeping woman, an impulse that she squashed down as she lingered in the shadows. Under her watchful eye, the Orion by the other Tilly’s side leant forward. He fumbled for something, and Sylvia tensed.

Just as she took her first step forward, Tilly finally stirred. 

Sylvia eased herself slowly back again and watched in surprise as the other woman sat up and immediately began to scold the Orion. There was a spark in this Tilly. She hadn't expected that.

A smile ghosted across her lips as she watched. Empire grunted unhappily at her feet, and she dropped a hand to his head to soothe him. Stroked the fur between his eyes as her own eyes widened when her Emperor walked in. And it was her Emperor. Sylvia knew those eyes too well to be mistaken or fooled by one of this world's copies.

When the tug in her belly urged her to leave her unconscious other self alone in the den, she listened. Sylvia clucked at Empire to draw his attention to follow her, even as she in turn began to follow her Emperor.

Sylvia ducked and weaved through the crowd, and for the first time the sight of green soothed instead of irritated her. Her feet fell along a path she did not know. Guided only by the actions of another person she had chosen to follow. But as Sylvia walked, something inside her eased and for a moment she felt at peace.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sure season two will abruptly joss me on the green spore being a sign of Tilly's Super Awesome Secret Spore Sensing Powers, but I had fun imagining the mycelium network as a kind of net binding two people's paths closer together as well as a series of pathways through the multiverse.


End file.
